Dear Friends,
I promise to not write about politics today.
So I was watching clips from a press conference by Rudy Gui—
Sorry. Let me try that again. I promise to not write about politics today.
I was astonished to see this Tweet from Eric Meta—
Argh. This is hard. I promise to not write about politics today.
…
Oh, fine. Just let me get this one teensy thing out of my system. When you want to make an argument for something, it is important that your desired conclusion not be your first premise. In ordinary logic, it’s kind of a basic principle that you do not assume as a premise the very thing you’re supposed to be proving.
It’s a tricky thing to begin by saying, “Joe Biden stole the election” (a conclusion), and then to try to backfill the assertion with evidence. I’m not saying it is impossible—scientists begin with hypotheses all the time. But “This election was rigged” is not operating as a hypothesis at all; it’s a settled conclusion for many people. The danger of treating your hypothesis as a predetermined conclusion is that it operates as an interpretive grid that makes all of the data and facts serve your desired narrative. This blinds you from seeing any other reasonable explanation. If you’ve already decided beforehand that “the election was rigged,” then any and every voting irregularity here and there has to be evidence of a rigged election, even when each and every instance is perfectly explicable without recourse to a shadowy global conspiracy involving a very dead Hugo Chavez, computer programmers, election officials, poll workers, and media outlets.
Clearly, this is what President Trump and his dwindling little band of court jesters are up to. But that’s not what I’m irritated about. I expect that.
I’m irritated by some people who very loudly came out of the gate screaming on election night, “STOLEN ELECTION!” and kept right on stoking outrageous hysteria endlessly on Twitter, now saying:
I’m just asking questions. What’s your problem?
Spare me the late claims of intellectual modesty. You know what I’ll respect?
An apology.
Temple & Time
I finished reading an extraordinary book this week: N.T. Wright, History & Eschatology: Jesus & The Promise of Natural Theology.
It’s a work of very advanced scholarship—if you’re not a graduate student I am strongly dissuading you from buying it. For scholars of systematic and biblical theology, however, it is a must-read. The book is the published form of a series of lectures Wright gave a few years ago at my Alma Mater, the University of Aberdeen, as part of a famous endowed yearly lecture series called The Gifford Lectures, established in 1887. The last time a New Testament scholar was invited to give the Giffords was in the 1950s, and that scholar was Rudolf Bultmann—a well-known theological liberal.
N.T. Wright took his once-in-a-generation opportunity to demolish at the foundations the entire project of Enlightenment theological scholarship. I cheered the whole way through, underlining and annotating, and wondering if I could somehow get a bucket of highlighter fluid and just dip every page top to bottom? It is that good.
But does any of it translate from the ivory tower to the street? Can an ordinary person benefit from the high-octane content of such a work? That’s the challenge for a theologian. I had a chance to test it out last night, and I think the results are promising, if somewhat mixed.
Our dinner table last night included two fourteen year old girls. Tough crowd. My wife and I were lamenting on the theological shallowness of much American evangelical Christianity. So I started talking about—you guessed it—this book I just finished and its radical implications. Professor Wright is arguing that if you want to understand history, and particularly the history of Jesus and the early church, then you need to get yourself into the worldview of the Jews and early Christians, particularly how they understood the cosmos of space and time.
We live in a day and age where everybody just assumes that heaven and earth are split: heaven (the spiritual realm) is “up there,” and earth (the material realm) is “down here,” and never the two shall meet. And over the last 300 years historians and scholars have been doing all their work under these intellectual conditions, which is why so much ink is spilled on whether something “supernatural” is possible in the “down here” natural world (that’s not the real question). Moreover, people think of history very similarly—the present age is all there is, or if there is an “age to come” it’s either way off in the “bye and bye” and has nothing to do with our lives or it’s something we can make happen by our collective action (Marx, etc.).
But the Jews and early Christians had very different notions. Heaven and earth were made for each other—you might look it up in the very first verse of the Bible. They are supposed to overlap and interlock. God and humans are supposed to dwell together. What do you think the Garden of Eden was all about? There is commerce between heaven and earth (see: Jacob’s Ladder). And all of these conceptions about “space” concentrate on one thing in particular: the Tabernacle, and later, the Temple. This is where the overlap is. This is where there is commerce between heaven and earth. This is where God dwells with his people. And it is a microcosm, a “working model,” of what the whole world will one day be: a Temple filled with God’s glory.
So also with history. There is the present age, the “ordinary” time of our bustling lives, but there is also a future time: the “age to come,” a new creation when God fully and finally is present and reigns over all. These two ages are not opposed to each other; in fact, in the present time there is established a day that already anticipates the new age: The Sabbath Day. The Sabbath is a forward-pointing sign of the “age to come,” when we will “enter God’s rest.”
I explained all this to these two teenage girls, and then asked them:
How many of Jesus’ arguments with the religious authorities involved the Temple and the Sabbath?
The only answer we could come up with is: all of them.
Really, think about it. It’s just about all of them. In Matthew 12 Jesus defended his disciples picking grain on the Sabbath by telling the Pharisees that David ate the showbread…in the Temple. And then he calls himself the “Lord of the Sabbath.”
This is where we see the importance of understanding the worldview of the time. The Pharisees were not “tsk tsk-ing” the disciples because they were “breaking the rules.” Sure, that was part of it. But their real beef was, “Who does this man think he is?” Jesus is saying that his disciples can pick the grain on the Sabbath because they are with him. Just as David ate in the Temple, so they can eat if they are with him. He is claiming to be the true Temple.
Indeed, that is the very thing of which they ultimately convict him:
“This fellow said, I am able to destroy the temple of God and rebuild it in three days” (Matt. 26:61).
Jesus walked around telling people that if they come to him, he will “give them rest” (Sabbath rest). He healed diseases and sicknesses and cast out demons and announced the arrival of God’s kingdom. In everything Jesus said and did, his enemies understood him perfectly well: he was claiming to be the Temple, the place where heaven and earth meet and God and man dwell together. He was also claiming that he was bringing the true Sabbath, the “age to come” reign of God into the present age.
And this is what his resurrection meant. The new Temple is established—the Risen Christ himself, who calls all nations to come to him by faith and enjoy fellowship with God, and he builds this “church,” his body, into a Temple in which God dwells. In him there is commerce between heaven and earth, complete access to God—not in this place or that place, but anywhere anyone “calls on the name of the Lord.” The new Sabbath has arrived, as the Spirit of God who raised him from the dead is poured out on a broken world, bringing the restorative and healing and restful power of God’s reign.
It all means that we are united to God in Christ (heaven and earth meet), and we are part of the new creation (the “then-and-there” is also “here-and-now”). Space and time, Temple and Sabbath, are fulfilled in Jesus Christ.
This practically means that no area of your life is disconnected from God—it cannot be, for, being united to Christ, you are a living Temple, and God fills his Temple, from top to bottom. There are no empty storage closets where you get to keep all the paraphernalia of your old sins.
It also means that you do not divide your time between the “earthly” and “spiritual” things, or between weekdays and Sunday: you live in the present age at all times as a citizen of heaven, a rightful heir and inhabitant of the age to come.
Some of it went over their heads, of course, but I’m still convinced this stuff will preach.
The most amazing thing about Wright’s book is that he does not invite us to see this ancient worldview as a curious artifact, a museum piece that we can objectively observe at a distance and say, fascinating! That’s as robust as these things usually get in the academy. No, he’s after something much more ambitious: if we want to make sense of life, the universe, and everything, we mustn’t observe this way of thinking; we must embrace this way of thinking. Temple and Sabbath, and a Resurrected Messiah that fulfills and embodies them both, is how the world actually is. And standing in the light of resurrection’s dawn, we can see and make sense of everything else.
Miscellany
It’s been a strange week for me. I’m not exactly a “high energy” guy normally, but this week I’ve been extremely fatigued. I suppose I might’ve caught a small case of Covid or something, but it hasn’t been accompanied by any other symptoms. And I’m not going to waste the time of medical professionals with, “I’m tired a lot.”
It dawned on me that one of the missing things in my cultural literacy is a good grasp of old Western movies. I mean, I am a big fan of the greatest Western of all time—Lonesome Dove, of course!—but I just haven’t seen a lot of Clint Eastwood or even John Wayne. So this week I watched two Sergio Leone classics, “A Fistful of Dollars” (Eastwood) and “Once Upon a Time in the West” (Charles Bronson and Peter Fonda). They are sprawling and pretty epic, but Leone as a Director is too in love with his own cinematography and from time to time lets scenes drag on way too long. I guess he was his generation’s Martin Scorsese.
Anyway, the “Western” is a really good genre, and I plan to work in Kevin Costner’s “Open Range.” That movie got pilloried when it came out, but I saw what he was doing and loved it. It was a love letter to the genre: he took every single hackneyed Western motif and made it into a credible—not cartoonish—story. And it has by far the best climactic Western gunfight I’ve ever seen.
If you’re wondering about the ethics of the new COVID vaccines, Andrew Walker has an excellent explainer.
If you’re a baseball fan, don’t miss this extremely rare footage of Honus Wagner! Amazing.
You might recall awhile back that Eddie Van Halen died. This week his son, Wolfgang, released a music video of a new song he wrote for him. It’s full of home video footage, and is quite touching—make sure to stick around for the very end. As Mark Hemingway wrote on Twitter, Eddie Van Halen had his share of problems, but it doesn’t look like being a bad father was one of them. Enjoy!